The Adaptive Optics Revolution

A History

Robert W. Duffner; Foreword by Robert Q. Fugate

Publication Year: 2009

Duffner has compiled the history of the most revolutionary breakthrough in astronomy since Galileo pointed his telescope skyward--the technology that will greatly expand our understanding of the universe.

Front Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Table of Contents

Foreword

For nearly 400 years, astronomers have lived with blurry images of the
planets, stars, galaxies, and indeed the universe when looking through their
ground-based telescopes. Looking through the atmosphere with a high magnification
telescope is like looking through shower glass with your eye. You can see shapes on the other side of the glass, but you can’t make out any...

Preface

An important reason for undertaking this project was to assess the contribution of the Department of Defense (DoD) in the relatively new field of adaptive optics. The intent was to capture a history that
serves as a bridge between a narrow group of highly specialized scientists
and a wider general audience. In the past, the DoD has often been accused of...

Introduction

Adaptive optics is the most revolutionary technological
breakthrough in astronomy since Galileo pointed his telescope skyward
to explore the heavens 400 years ago. The recent marriage of large
ground-based telescopes capturing huge amounts of light with advanced
adaptive optics technology has resulted in spectacular high-resolution...

List of Acronyms

1: Sputnik, Reality, and Technology

Military research on adaptive optics originated in a
small Department of Defense research and development organization known
as the Advanced Research Projects Agency or ARPA. That organization pursued
cutting-edge research beginning in the 1970s that led to the development...

2: Early Days: The Romans

ARPA and the Air Force realized that before any
serious work could be performed to design, develop, and build a working
adaptive optics system to produce high-resolution images, scientists at several
Air Force laboratories would have to better understand the main problem
that adaptive optics needed to fix: turbulence caused by temperature...

3: Rome and Itek: First Adaptive Optics Systems

As RTAC took off, Urtz went to his boss in 1973 and
asked for more people to accommodate his increased workload. He understood
the long-term significance of the RTAC work. The more competent
people he could assign to this project, the more he believed he could build...

4: Laser Guide Stars

At the same time that Rome researchers were
making significant headway with programs such as RTAC and CIS, the Air
Force Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base began assuming a
more active role in the development of adaptive optics. Although Rome and
Kirtland pursued similar programs, there was a fundamental difference in...

5: Fugate’s Rayleigh Guide Star Experiments

The Jasons’ 1982 summer meeting represented a
major turning point in the development of adaptive optics. Rett Benedict
became convinced that DARPA should fund parallel programs to investigate
two different techniques for creating laser guide stars to measure wavefront
distortion—the Rayleigh backscattering method and the sodium-layer...

6: Lincoln Laboratory

At the same time that Bob Fugate’s team of Air Force
scientists were conducting the Rayleigh guide star experiments, Charles
Primmerman was leading a Lincoln Laboratory team at White Sands
Missile Range in southern New Mexico that would be the first to experimentally
verify the sodium guide star concept. Located in Lexington...

7: Sharing the Gold: Astronomical Nuggets

Bob Fugate’s team at Kirtland and Chuck Primmerman’s
team at Lincoln made pioneering contributions to laser guide star technology
in the 1980s that had a lasting effect not only on the United States
Air Force, but also on academic astronomy. The military, through DARPA,
RADC (later Rome Laboratory), the Air Force Weapons Laboratory...

8: Strategic Defense Initiative

By early 1978, the Lincoln Laboratory work at West Palm
Beach had wound down and come to a halt because Lincoln scientists believed
they had accomplished what they had set out to do. Interest within the Air
Force had also moved to shorter-wavelength lasers—such as the chemical
oxygen-iodine laser or COIL, first developed at AFWL in 1977, and the Navy’s...

9: Airborne Laser

By the early 1990s, the Air Force, DARPA, Lincoln
Laboratory, the Navy, and a number of independent contractors had been
actively engaged in adaptive optics research for two decades. During that
time, there were many impressive technical accomplishments in this relatively
new field of science. The military suspected early on that adaptive...

The application of adaptive optics to the Airborne
Laser program brought closer the day this revolutionary weapon system
could be introduced into the Air Force operational inventory. But that
was not the only mission that the Air Force envisioned for adaptive optics
technology...

11: 3.67-Meter Military Telescope Complex: Maui, Hawaii

The 3.5-meter (11.5-foot) telescope developed for
SOR was the Department of Defense’s largest and most advanced operational
telescope for most of the 1990s. But toward the end of the decade, the
Starfire telescope would be surpassed in size by the slightly larger AEOS
telescope installed on the summit of Haleakala in July 1997; it became fully...

12: Sodium Guide Star Laser: The Future

At the Jasons’ 1982 summer session in La Jolla, Will
Happer from Princeton presented the revolutionary concept that the mesospheric
sodium layer could be used to generate a high-altitude artificial
guide star for use with an adaptive optics telescope. He proposed using a
specially tuned yellow laser beam to excite the sodium atoms in the mesosphere...

Conclusion

From the late 1960s to the present, the United States
Air Force has played a leading role in the development of the revolutionary
technology of adaptive optics. The Air Force laboratory system served as
the focal point for pioneering research energized by the brainpower and
persistence of an extremely competent team of military and civil service...

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